Now in the Situation Room in May 2011, as Obama watched the grainy image of the chopper making an emergency landing in Pakistan, he feared the worst, but the pilot managed to land: ‘I saw … grainy figures on the ground … entering the main house’ as the commandos worked their way up the three-storey house, passing groups of children, shooting three armed men who challenged them, a woman who was caught in crossfire, until they reached the top floor: they heard shots. But where was Geronimo?
THE KILLING OF GERONIMO
On the top floor of the mansion, the Seals encountered Osama bin Laden, ‘the man who had directed the murder of thousands and set in motion a tumultuous period of world history’. They shot him in the forehead and chest. In the Situation Room, ‘audible gasps’. Obama was ‘glued to the video feed’. Then suddenly ‘we heard … words we’d been waiting to hear’.
‘Geronimo ID’d … Geronimo EKIA.’ Enemy killed in action.
‘We got him,’ said Obama softly. A photo arrived of the dead terrorist: ‘I glanced briefly … it was him.’
Bin Laden’s body was carried off by the Seals, and was later buried in the Arabian Sea. When Obama announced the hit, he linked it to his own mission. ‘Americans can do whatever we set our mind to – that’s the story of our history,’ he said. ‘We can do these things because of who we are.’
Geronimo had been a risk. The new technologies offered easier ways to wage surgical warfare. On 30 September 2011, Obama approved the killing by drone of a terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. It was far from being the first of these killings by US ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, devices that heralded a new era of warfare.*
Trump did not run for the presidency in 2012. As Obama won his second term, an intrigue in Chongqing was settling the struggle of two princelings for the Chinese leadership. In November 2011, the body of an English financier, Neil Heywood, entangled in high Chinese politics via a powerful woman he called an ‘empress’, was discovered in a Chongqing hotel, destroying one candidate for the leadership – and opening the way for the other to be the all-powerful autocrat. The two rivals were both crown princes, sons of Mao’s grandees, leaders and heirs of what the Party called ‘lineages’ of family power. Bo Xilai, flamboyant son of one of Deng’s Eight Immortals, was an ambitious Politburo member, boss of what was later called the ‘independent kingdom’ of Chongqing, and candidate for the leadership.
His rival was Xi Jinping, son of Deng’s ally Xi Zhongxun, who had fallen from power and then returned to the top. Xi junior, like many of those who had been rusticated, combined the entitlement of the princelings with the plain, harsh habits of the peasants. The trauma had made the family closer; it had toughened Xi but it had not put him off the Party. On the contrary, it was the Party that had restored order and safety after the Cultural Revolution. But it was only after Mao’s death that Deng brought them back. When Xi senior retired, he arranged for his son to work at the Central Military Commission, the most important office after the Politburo’s Standing Committee. In 1986, when he was promoted to deputy secretary of Hebei province, he met someone who changed his destiny. Peng Liyuan was the most famous singer in China, a beautiful soprano who, sporting Red Army uniform, sang Party ballads. Xi, just emerged from an unhappy marriage to an ambassador’s daughter, ‘fell in love at first sight’ – according to his official biography – and they had a daughter. His stolid climb up the Party was far from meteoric. In 1997, he joined the Central Committee as an alternate, becoming a full member in 2002, but he was on his way. He was appointed first secretary of Zhejiang province and in 2007 joined the Standing Committee as a future leader. But just behind him came the flashier Bo, who caught up fast.
Bo had a flaw – his wife, Gu Kailai, herself the daughter of a general. Together they had recruited Heywood as their fixer, in return for commissions. But Heywood, fluent in Chinese and married to a Chinese woman, got too close. When Gu demanded he divorce his wife and devote himself to her interests, he complained she was ‘behaving like an old-fashioned Chinese aristocrat or empress’. Whether he had an affair with Gu or demanded a vast commission or both, Gu recruited the Chongqing police chief who entertained Heywood then poisoned him with cyanide, declaring later that his death was from alcohol poisoning. They cremated the body. When the police chief feared he was about to be killed himself and sought asylum in the US embassy, the murder was exposed.
In 2012, Bo and Gu were arrested and condemned, their patrons on the Standing Committee were purged and their rival Xi emerged as the leader. As Obama led the US in holding pattern, Xi directed what he called the ‘resurrection’ of China. But it was a more singular moment than that: America was starting a process of self-laceration that altered its world mission. As the bipolar system was a memory and American paramountcy was wavering, China, which many times had dominated its own region, would, for the first time, join the World Game.
* In Latin America, the end of the struggle against Communism accelerated the fall of juntas in Argentina and Brazil, which then became democracies; in Paraguay, the vicious Hispano-Bavarian tyrant Stroessner, who had protected Josef Mengele, was deposed; in Haiti, ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, who at nineteen had inherited the throne from his father Papa Doc, claimed he was ‘firm as a monkey tail’ but, rocked by protests and pressured by Washington, flew into exile. In Colombia and Mexico, America feared a new export, not Communism but cocaine. In 1989 in Colombia, the rise of a minor Colombian cigarette smuggler from Medellín in the late 1970s had transformed the cocaine business: Pablo Escobar, paunchy and moustachioed, had created a business – offering his victims ‘money or lead’ – that manufactured cocaine and delivered it to its American markets. Now at his height, he exported eighty tons a month, bringing in $70 million a day, so much that he subverted and corrupted the fragile Colombian state. When threatened, he launched a murderous terror in which his assassins killed 25,000 people with bullet and bomb, even blowing up a civilian airliner while, worth $30 billion and commanding his own army, he lived in splendour at his spacious ranches. When Escobar was arrested, he was so powerful he was able to build his own prison, and escape when he wished. America intervened to help Colombia: on 2 December 1993, Escobar, at the age of forty-four, was finally hunted down and killed by American and Colombian commandos, his business commandeered by a more discreet cartel from Cali. After they too were arrested, the business was taken over by Mexican narcotraficantes who lethally undermined the Mexican state.
* Nazarbayev was an astute player of the system, orchestrating the overthrow of his boss to become the youngest premier in the Union. ‘I was an ambitious young man and Party membership was the route to all advancement,’ he explained. ‘If I had thought that it would have helped my ambition in those days to be a Buddhist I would have become a Buddhist.’
* Except in Albania, still a Communist dictatorship. Hoxha had died in 1985 but his chosen heir Ramiz Alia was still hoping to hang on – which he did until December 1990.